"My, my, my. How the time must fly when you know you're gonna die by the end of the night." --Streetlight Manifesto

Submitted: December 07, 2017

AAA
|
AAA

Icomment enabled

Submitted: December 07, 2017

AAA

AAA

Icomment on

Anxiety

The second hand ticked by the twelve, completing another cycle.

And then it went by again, just a moment later.

And then again.

Then again.

Again.

Time after time, the second hand completed a revolution.

Second by second, the ticking got faster and faster.

Oh, how time flies.

I sat at my desk in silence, in fear, in darkness. Over my shoulders was slung a thick slate of Kevlar, in my right hand, a fully loaded and
cocked 9 mm pistol. I knew I had maybe an hour left to live, and little to no chance of survival after that. When they came for me, I would die squeezing the trigger.

I can’t say I blame them for what they were going to do. I probably would do the same if they were in my shoes. But…I had to go with what the
morals and ethics in my head were screaming at me. In kindergarten, snitches get stitches. In the real world, where the cocaine business exists, snitches get holes punched between the eyebrows. The
cops caught me driving an hour after I did a line. As a plea bargain, I sold out my dealer.

And so there I sat, gun pointed at the door. Waiting for one of the many coke gangs to come and waste me.

I remained motionless when the doorknob jiggled. I sat there like a solid slate of stone behind my desk for what must’ve been an hour,
petrified at the thought of what was on the other side of that inch-thick hunk of wood. The office was silent and dark. Even the moonlight seemed to look away from the tensions of the
room.

The knob jiggled again.

The second hand ticked once.

I fired eleven rounds through the glass window of the door. I heard a corpse hit the floor. Time returned to normal. Had I beaten them? Had I
saved my life?

I stood and walked to the door. The blinds were riddled and falling apart, and the glass was opaque with thousands of spider webs, but every
bullet had gone through.

I slowly pushed the door open. One body laid face-down on the floor.

But it was a face that I recognized.

She was my receptionist.

I stumbled backwards through the door into my office. I finally found rest on the edge of my desk. To my right, I saw the pistol—the twelfth
and final bullet had gone un-fired. I looked up at the corpse I had made, and thought about her family. Her kids. Her husband. I had stolen that from her. I had bloodied my hands. The waters of all
the oceans of the world could not cleanse me.